How does YOUR bank protect you from the growing wave of AI voice cloning scams?

Fraudsters use AI technology to imitate the voices of the friends or family members of unassuming victims and use it to extort money.

More than a quarter of people have been targeted by this AI voice cloning fraud at least once in the past year.

And now millions more people are at risk of getting caught, data shows.

It comes as the Payments Systems Regulator confirmed it would reduce the proposed fraud reimbursement limit from £415,000 to £85,000 as the rules come into effect on October 7.

This is Money asked banks how they are combating the growing wave of AI voice clone scams and what they are doing to protect customers.

Why are AI voice clone scams a problem?

An AI voice cloning scam is an advanced type of scam where fraudsters use voice cloning technology to replicate a person’s voice from a short audio clip.

Fraudsters can cheaply and easily capture and create an audio deepfake online in minutes.

The audio clips used in AI voice cloning scams can be easily captured from a video someone uploaded online or to social media, or even from a voicemail message.

It is said that scammers only need three seconds of audio to clone your voice.

They can identify their victim’s relatives and use the cloned voice to send them a phone call, voicemail or voicemail asking for money that is urgently needed, for example due to an accident or to pay the rent.

What are banks doing to protect customers?

Rob Woods, fraud and identity specialist at LexisNexis Risk Solutions said: ‘AI-driven deepfake scams, such as voice cloning, are a growing concern for UK banks as they are an effective way to convince victims that they urgently need to make money. transfer to a friend or family member in need.”

The problem with these scams is that by getting the victim to authorize the payment, fraudsters are effectively bypassing all of the bank’s strong authentication steps put in place to prevent them from stealing your money.

“The challenge for banks is to understand how to identify fraudulent transfer requests, compared to genuine requests,” Woods continues.

‘There are a number of risk signals available that can help, such as AI-powered behavioral biometrics that analyze how a phone is used, and live call detection – banks use these types of signals to build risk models that help detect when fraud might occur. are on their way.’

While criminals are finding more and more ways to use AI to defraud people, banks are also using AI to fight fraud, and have been doing so for 20 years.

Woods said: ‘Three major banks that introduced AI models to tackle scams saw an average increase of 260 percent in the number of fraud detected.’

LexisNexis Risk Solutions could not reveal which three banks have introduced AI models to tackle scams.

Santander

Santander uses machine learning models, powered by a company called Lynx Tech, to combat card and payment fraud.

Lynx Tech’s platform uses AI to learn customer transactional behavior and detect fraud.

It says the system searches 66 billion transactions annually and protects 300 million customers from fraud.

A Santander spokesperson said: ‘We have been using AI for a number of years for payment detection, behavior detection and a variety of other use cases.

“Reported AI scams are quite difficult to identify as customers are often unaware that AI is involved in the scam.

“We have a series of comprehensive checks and balances in place to detect and prevent the use of AI voice clones.”

Research from Santander shows that more than half of Brits have never heard of the term deepfake, or have misunderstood what it means.

While only 17 percent of people are confident they can easily identify a deepfake video.

Nationwide

One of the ways Nationwide Building Society protects its customers from AI Voice clone scams is by not allowing phone banking payments. If a customer wants to make a payment to a friend or family member, he or she can make the payment at a branch

Nationwide also uses AI to analyze transaction data.

A spokesperson for Nationwide said: ‘Nationwide does not allow payments to be made via telephone banking, but we still monitor suspicious voting activity to protect our customers.

“AI and advanced analytics are an important part of our multi-layered fraud prevention framework.

‘We are concerned about the increase in these scams and are working hard to ensure our customers remain protected. This includes the use of advanced analytics and voice-specific controls. It is important that consumers are vigilant against attacks that could affect them directly, such as callers posing as family or friends.”

Barclays

Barclays invests in multi-layer security systems that help protect customers. It says these typically prevent several thousand attempted fraudulent transactions every day.

This includes an advanced transaction profiling system that is unique to each customer.

A Barclays spokesperson said: ‘For each of the more than 50 million payments our UK customers make every month, our fraud detection systems and machine learning models determine in less than a second whether it is likely to be a fraudster rather than the customer, or that our It seems that the customer is at risk of being scammed.

‘If the transaction appears risky, the customer will be offered additional checks before the payment is released.’

‘In addition to our technical prevention, we work tirelessly to help the public with information and tools to detect and stop fraud and scams, including alert messages throughout the payment journey, scam education through in-app notifications, social media channels, the press and a special website.’

Starlingbank

Starling launched a Safe Phrases campaign to support the government’s fraud campaign to raise awareness of AI voice cloning scams among customers in response to its emergence.

It encourages people to agree on a secure phrase or password with their close friends and family that no one else knows, so they can verify that they are really talking to them when they call and ask for money.

If a person is then contacted by someone pretending to be a friend or family member, and he/she does not know the phrase, he or she can be immediately alerted that it is likely a scam.

Monzo

Monzo introduced new fraud protection for customers earlier this year.

One of these was a trusted contacts feature, where customers can choose a friend or family member to monitor any bank transfers and savings withdrawals above the set daily amount.

It involves customers agreeing to allow selected friends and family to see some details about the transactions they make. Then Monzo will ask them to confirm it’s you and check if it looks safe.

The idea behind this is that, as someone who knows the customer, friends and family can flag if something seems suspicious. For example, if they know that you are not planning any major purchases.

NatWest

A spokesperson for NatWest said: ‘AI voice cloning fraud is a threat that we recognize and monitor, engaging internal and external technical experts to ensure we have robust authentication and detection capabilities to prevent this type of abuse and that testing is in place of this protection. ‘

‘We recognize the opportunities that fraudsters have, and the rapid evolution of technologies that create more accurate clones of individual voices, and that these synthetic voices can be used to manipulate a customer through social engineering, or can be used in an effort to impersonate our customers at the bank, in order to gain access to banking services or customer funds

‘Improved privacy controls on social media are important, but people can also help protect themselves by thinking about what information they share publicly on social media.’

Woods said: ‘Banks and other financial services are now under even more pressure to stop APP fraud as a result of the PSR’s new scam reimbursement rules.

We also approached HSBC and Lloyds for comment, but both declined to comment.